Privacy policy

CritABCD is operated by Utkarsh Kumar (trading as Learning Experience Initiative for Online Classes), A 801, Runwal Bliss, Kanjurmarg East, 400042 Mumbai, India. Contact for anything in this policy: freanchie@gmail.com. See also the Impressum.

When a teacher uses CritABCD with a class, the school and teacher decide to do so and are responsible for telling parents and for any consent the school needs. We provide the service for that purpose only and are willing to sign a data processing agreement with a school.

Account. Name and email address (from your Google account or typed by you), whether you said you are a teacher or a student, and optionally your school. We do not store passwords: sign-in is by Google or by a one-time code sent to your email.

In a class or live activity. Your answers and drafts, points and badges, whether the activity tab is in front or switched away and how many times it was switched, your grades and teacher feedback, photos or sketches you choose to upload, and private messages between you and your teacher. A cartoon avatar is generated from an internal id; it is not a photo of you.

Optional mailing list. If a parent, guardian or teacher leaves an email address in a sign-up form, we keep that address with the choices they ticked. Every email we send carries an unsubscribe link and our postal address, and you can also unsubscribe at any time on the unsubscribe page. Students under 16 are asked to have a parent or guardian do this.

Technical. A sign-in session cookie, a copy of your unsent answers in your own browser so nothing is lost, and anonymous page-view statistics. There is no advertising and no tracking across other sites.

To let students and teachers run and complete classroom activities, to show a teacher how a class is doing so they can help and grade, to keep your work safe, and to keep the service secure. We do not sell personal data and we do not use students’ work or messages for advertising.

Anyone who is given a session’s join code can join that session and will then appear on its roster, which is how students join a live class.

A teacher who runs a session can send a private message to any student in it, and the student can reply. Only that teacher and that student can read the thread, and the operator can as administrator. Messages are stored with the rest of the session, are not scanned automatically and are not sent to any other service. They are kept until the session data is deleted (see section 8). Students cannot message each other.

Uploaded images are kept in private storage. They can be opened only by the student who uploaded them, the teacher who ran the session and the teacher of the class, through links that expire after an hour. Please do not upload photos of faces or of anything private.

Some activities let a student interview a fictional character, written by us, with replies produced by an AI language model run by Groq. Only the question the student typed, the earlier turns of that conversation and the character’s description are sent; the student’s name, email and class are not. The characters are made-up and what they say is not evidence.

The writing coach that highlights key words and shows a level runs entirely in the student’s own browser. The text being checked is not sent to us or to anyone else.

We keep account, class and live-activity data until the account holder, the school or a parent asks us to delete it, or for 12 months after the account was last used, whichever comes first; accounts unused for 12 months are reviewed and deleted at least once a year. A student can delete their own account and everything they did in classes at any time in Settings, under “Delete my data”, and it is removed straight away. We will act on any other deletion request within 30 days, and sooner for a school ending its use of the service. Teacher accounts are deleted on request, because deleting one also removes that teacher’s classes and sessions. Backups are overwritten on the provider’s normal cycle. Email addresses given in a mailing-list form are kept separately and removed on request.

• Supabase: database, sign-in and file storage. Location: AWS, Mumbai (India).
• Vercel: hosting of the website and its server functions, and anonymous page-view statistics. Location: United States.
• Groq: replies of the fictional interview characters (only the typed question and the earlier turns of that conversation, never a name or email). Location: United States.
• Google: optional “Sign in with Google”. Location: as set out in Google’s own terms.

Some of these providers are outside the European Economic Area. We use them under their own data protection terms and give them only what they need for the purpose above.

CritABCD is designed for students of the IB Middle Years Programme, roughly ages 11 to 16, who use it because their teacher asked them to. We do not run advertising to children and we do not ask students for more than the above. A parent or guardian can ask to see, correct or delete their child’s data at any time by writing to freanchie@gmail.com.

You can ask to see the data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, and to receive a copy. You can also complain to your data protection authority. To use any of these rights, write to freanchie@gmail.com; we will answer within 30 days. A student can also delete their own data in Settings (see section 8). If you are a student, you can ask your teacher or your school to contact us for you.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and tell the teachers who use the service.